The Avalon Centre Floors for a new rehab unit, bungalows and a café.

The Avalon Centre in Swindon has a new 12-bed rehabilitation unit, five bungalows and a café, built by Briar Construction for Montpelier Estates as an extension to the existing centre. For Briar, Adapt Flooring laid the floors in all of them.

The brief and the building

The rehabilitation unit, called the Slow Stream building on the drawings, has 12 bedrooms with en-suites, lounges, a reception, offices, a clinic, a dispensary and a kitchen. Two of the five bungalows are high-dependency units, and each bungalow has a bedroom, a lounge and dining room and a shower room. The café building has the café itself, an arts and hobbies room and a servery.

The floors, room by room

Polyflor Forest FX, a wood-effect sheet vinyl, runs through the bedrooms, lounges and corridors of the rehabilitation unit and the bungalows, and through the unit's reception and offices. The café, its corridor and the arts and hobbies room have a darker wood effect in Polyflor Wood FX, a safety vinyl. Forbo Coral Welcome barrier matting sits at the entrances.

In the wet rooms we laid wet-area safety vinyl: Altro Pisces in the 12 en-suites and the assisted bathroom, and Gerflor Tarasafe H2O in the bungalow shower rooms. The clinic, the dispensary, the unit's kitchen, the café servery and the WCs are in Gerflor Tarasafe Ultra. As the specification asked, the safety vinyl in these rooms is coved up the walls, and the joints in the sheet vinyl are welded.

Before ordering, we planned the drops room by room against the roll lengths, so offcuts from one room were planned in as filler strips for another.

Getting the subfloor right

The new screeds, which carry underfloor heating, were diamond ground first: about 850m² across the unit, the bungalows and the café, to remove laitance and plaster and give a key for what went on top.

The damp-proof membrane was a provisional item, left to the moisture readings. Ardex tested the screeds for us with a digital hygrometer: they read from 74% to just over 79% relative humidity, against the 75% limit in BS 8203 for laying vinyl, so we applied a damp-proof membrane where the readings called for it, then smoothed the floors with a latex levelling compound.

Working for the main contractor

We were on site for Briar Construction in the autumn of 2025. Under a separate order from Briar, we also lined the walls of the en-suites and shower rooms in Altro Whiterock hygienic wall cladding.

Briar is a main contractor we work with regularly. With Briar, we have also worked on the floors of Emerald Place Clinic and Cefn Carnau Hospital for Montpelier Estates.